Microsoft's 'Hohm' Will Help You Manage Your Power

Microsoft has developed a new Web site, dubbed Hohm, designed to help consumers monitor and manage their energy consumption.

Microsoft has developed a new Web site, dubbed Hohm, designed to help consumers monitor and manage their energy consumption.

Hohm will launch in roughly a week's time, but Microsoft will formally announce the site at an energy conference Wednesday in San Francisco.

Put simply, Hohm is Microsoft's service to allow consumers to see how much electrical power and gas they consume in a given month, with suggestions on how to lower their consumption. Propane and fuel oil consumption are also targeted for the launch. In the future, Microsoft will add water monitoring. Then, next year, the company plans to add device monitoring, working with thermostat manufacturers and developers of "smart plugs" to provide even more specific data on energy consumption.

Hohm was designed to help reduce a consumer's energy costs. But Microsoft hopes that Hohm helps smooth the demand for energy, avoiding spikes during peak times that can be costly for provider and consumer alike. It's a service, though somewhat abstract, that utility companies will pay for, said Troy Batterberry, a product unit manager within Microsoft's Energy Management and Home Automation group. But Hohm will be free for consumers, and doesn't even require Internet Explorer, he said.

"What we believe is needed in terms of the energy market is demand elasticity: you as a consumer will consume electricity when it is cheap and plentiful, and curtail your energy use when it is cheap and scarce," Batterberry said.

In some ways, the Hohm service is a direct competitor to Google's PowerMeter, an iGoogle widget which was designed to communicate with a network of "smart," or connected, power meters. Microsoft's Hohm works similarly, but asks utility providers to provide a direct data feed to the service using a standardized set of certifications and encryption algorithms.

New Hohm users log in with an email address and a ZIP code; if a user already has a Live account, this information will already be supplied.

Hohm wants to answer three questions, Batterberry said: what is a user's energy spending, how it compares to other users, and how it can be improved.

Hohm was developed with algorithms developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as well as the Department of Energy. Because of this, Hohm will initially launch within the United States, although Microsoft has plans to expand Hohm to Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and eventually Asia, once comparable algorithms are found.

Those algorithms pre-calculate the user's energy cost, based on known geographical data; users will probably pay more for energy in Fargo in December than San Diego, for example.

From there, however, users can fine-tune their data as much as they want. Hohm users will be asked to complete a questionnaire of about eight questions, dealing with the size of their home, its age, whether the home has air conditioning, and other basics. That questionnaire will also be somewhat tailored to the iuser's geographical region, Batterberry said. But users also have the choice of diving deep with almost 200 questions, supplying the service with specific details of devices present in the home and their energy usage.

A basic pie chart also attempts to break down how much the user will spend on heating or cooling his or her home, versus lighting, entertainment, and other uses. Hohm uses that information to provide a basic and somewhat arbitrary comparison to others in the area; in the future, users will have the option to make comparisons using the square footage or number of residents living in the house as a metric, Batterberry said.

Users have the option of either entering information from their utility bills or asking the utility companies to send information directly to the Hohm site itself.

Hohm signed up just four utilities for launch: Puget Sound Energy and Seattle City Light, both near Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash.; the Sacramento Municipal Utility Ditrict, or SMUD; and Xcel Energy, a Midwestern provider. "We didn't invite a lot of utility providers early on," Batterberry said. "We wanted to establish close relationships with early partners."

Hohm plans to add about six more utility providers within 2009, Batterberry said.

In the future, Microsoft plans to get involved with both programmble thermostats as well as "smart plugs," a sort of smart power strip which would be used with electronic devices. Microsoft has partnered with Itron and Landis Gyr, both leading companies in the smart meter market, Batterberry said.

"Smart plugs," a complementary device, would serve three purposes: remote control, scheduling, and granular usage measurement, providing another way to tell how much power a TV consumed on a regular basis, for example, or remotely turning off a device when the owner is at work.

Microsoft already developed its own programmable thermostat prototype, Batterberry said, and the company was still evaluating whether it made sense for it to develop its own branded smart plug.

Hohm was three years in the making, as part of Microsoft's Startup Business Accelerator, a sort of in-house incubator within Microsoft. Businesses within the unit have to prove themselves viable, but can lean on the parent organization for marketing and other technical help, explained Marja Koopmans, the marketing leader of the unit.